You don't need a bootable floppy if you have the xp pro or home cd. Just let the computer boot up from cd and use the repair option. Then under the command prompt type in "format c:" without the quotes of course.

Posted by daddyo
That's how I did mine. I used my old Win98 boot floppy to reformat the HD and then installed WinXP Pro from the CD. Of course, you only get Fat32, but you can change to NTFS later if you desire.

This is a well known technique and works every time.

Click to expand...

To my knowlage you can not use the format c: in DOS while you are using NTFS. Format c: only works on FAT32 partitions.

The easiest way to redo your HD is to delete the primary partition using FDISK and then set a new partition. You can do this from the Win98 boot disk. The resulting partition will be FAT32. Then you can format your drive from the A:\ drive using the FORMAT prompt. Once you have formatted the drive, you can change the partition to NTFS during the WinXP installation...it gives you the option of staying with FAT32 or converting to NTFS.

I find this technique useful if I want to do a clean install of my OS. It gets rid of every shred of every file on the HD, which is hard to do if you just use the "delete" command. It's much faster too.